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another random user sends this excerpt from the BBC:
"U.S. net firm Verizon has declared war on illegal downloaders, or pirates, who use technologies such as BitTorrent to steal copyrighted material. Verizon has said it will first warn repeat offenders by email and voicemail. Then it will restrict or 'throttle' their internet connection speeds. Time Warner Cable, another U.S. internet service provider pledging to tackle piracy, says it will use pop-up warnings to deter repeat offenders. After that it will restrict subscribers' web browsing activities by redirecting them to a landing page. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which campaigns for digital freedom, is highly critical of the imminent campaign, saying: 'Big media companies are launching a massive peer-to-peer surveillance scheme to snoop on subscribers.' ISPs will be acting as 'Hollywood's private enforcement arm,' it added."

3. Reduces their profit margin as people move away from these services to ones that don't give a fuck whats on the wire.4. Makes them liable for all the other 'bad' things their customers do. They have displayed they DO have the level of control needed to stop spam or other crap comming from their customers machines.

(4) might be a real concern, but (3) is not. In the US, very few areas actually have any competition. The regulation that allowed viable competition to exist were removed so even even urban areas are unlikely to have more then 2 options, most areas will only have 1.

What regulation that allowed viable competition was removed? As far as I am aware, both cable providers and telephone providers have been regulated as local monopolies for almost as long as the former has existed and since before I was born for the latter. Unless someone else is allowed to run the cabling/fiber there can be no real competition. The fact that there are no more than two options just about everywhere is a product of regulation, not a product of the removal of regulation.

In the past DSL providers, just like phone companies, were required to lease to other ISPs, thus even though you physically had a verizon connection you could use anyone as your ISP.... just like with dial up you were not required to use the telco's ISP service. Cable was not regulated like that since it was considered too small at first and when it got large enough they decided to remove the DSL regulation rather then bring Cable into it. Pretty much overnight we went from an ecosystem where you could ch

Verizon already got sued for this once, it was a good day when I received a check for $50 for my old broadband card when I got kicked off their network at the very end of my contract (I had another ISP so I didn't give a f').

We have seen all kinds of examples of some entity claiming ownership of a work they don't in fact own. What protects consumers from spurious claims? Good will of the entertainment industry? They don't have any. This kind of practice will make consumers turn against the entertainment industry and demand it be muzzled.

What are the chances that this will simply be used to target anyone who uses the bandwidth they paid for?

Not to mention the lucrative $35 review fees [pcworld.com] involved. It's a win-win for Verizon.

Soon this will turn into highly desirable insurance -- i.e. "pay extra $10/month and we will protect you from lawsuits by not releasing your info". (or at least actually fight for you in court before releasing it)

It's not a win-win in markets where they have competition or for customers that are paying for more than their most basic tier of service. If they are serious about this I predict that they will lose over 90% of their higher tier customers. Why pay extra for all that bandwidth if all you can use it for is to make a web page load 1/10000 of a second faster?

Where I live luckily there is still a high speed non-Comcast alternative that hasn't joined forces with the MAFIAA. If Verizon ever throttles me they will

I usually download DVD images of Linux distributions as evaluation copies. If it is midnight, (GMT-5), I will start a torrent for a distribution and go to bed. My ISP does not support high upload rates, so throttling is more or less done by the system. During the day, I will use wget and a mirror website to download my favorite distribution. Since I am in North America, if I can, I choose a mirror that is in Europe. Midnight there, is 6pm here in Montreal. At midnight their system us is low, and ours is

I've had it when it was plain adsl at 1.5 megabit down in the late 90's all the way to now vdsl with 20 megabit down. They still offer newsgroup access free with all their accounts, and ability to generate emails at will up to 20, then you can delete ones not needed and recreate sorta as a anonymous email service of their own.

every year or so they claim on dslreports forum that they'll never keep logs more than 1 week for legal purposes mainly to do with child porn, and they so far have not responded to letters from antip2p companies like mediadefender, claiming they get trashed.

Now things may change in future, but there is no bandwidth cap and it's truly unlimited, I know according to DUmeter, adding upload/download together I used 418 gigs last month and average 317 to 422 gigs per month, most of it is torrent traffic seeding and downloading. And never got a letter or even bothered.

I always tell people stay the fuck away from cable and big name dsl like at&t and stick to local telco services, local landline small companies most all offer dsl2plus to vdsl services and are much much better than cable.

No bandwidth caps, no filtering, and no bother, true freedom at least for now.

I've been pirating since 1996 though when I cut my cable tv off. Starting on newsgroups and IRC old "fserve" bots for television episodes and movies.

Now it's torrent RSS downloader on the seedbox connected to my western digital WDTV Live plus box on my tv.

I definitely support local telco's cause most ignore the bullshit of the big isp's, hell my isp even sent out letters letting customers know they will not be taking part in this "6 strike" shit and marketed as if it was a cable only problem so it keeps their customers from wanting to go to cable.

Same here, I also have a local DSL provider, i don't get the same speeds cable users do but I've literally no hassel from my ISP with regards to my bandwidth usage which can be up to a terrabyte a month on really high months.

There are two local telephone providers in my general area (that I know about), though neither serves my town with DSL. The one that also offers fixed wireless (which I *can* get) is twice as expensive for lower bandwidth, AND they have absolutely no issues in passing your information over to media companies wanting to sue you...

End result, data caps and packet snooping so it's a pain in the ass to download ANY large amount of data because we're automatically assumed to be dirty pirates.

I feel your pain, but don't be deluded into thinking that pirates cause data caps

Verizon doesn't want to upgrade their network and supply the bandwidth they actually sold. Overselling is lucrative -- hence the data caps

Also, many providers are paving the way for selling their own streaming services (or partnering with one). Hence, it is nice to have strict caps and then say "oh, and OUR service does not count towards your cap".

People should buy digital content now that it is sometimes available in a convenient form. But don't think for a second that doing so will stop all this bandwidth cap bullshit. We need competition -- having multiple alternative ISP services available would be a good start. Over last decade, I usually had 1 choice available to me, sometimes 2 (cable and DSL).

In other news, Verizon customer John Doe has declared his Web browsing history and related Internet activity to be a "work of art" created by him and subject to copyright protection. On Friday he announced that any company caught illegally downloading, storing or sharing his copyrighted work will be subject to throttling: a process by which he reduces his payments for their services to pennies per day.

Why isn't this a two-way street? If the consumer did this, Verizon would simply say he had not paid what he owed in full. But here Verizon is unilaterally deciding not to provide the service in full. Perhaps the consumer should have the right to charge the company late fees for services not rendered in full.

Though you may think you can do that you can't. Unfortunately. Congress determined pretty explicitly what types of works are covered by copyright. There has been a number of cases where things such as live broadcasts were not covered by Congress's copyright protection and the rulings have been that those events don't get that sort of protection (complete protection). Read the techdirt.com article about the UW restricting journalistic tweets to X #. I think you'll understand why his claim of copyrighte

Time Warner Cable, another U.S. internet service provider pledging to tackle piracy, says it will use pop-up warnings to deter repeat offenders.

How, exactly, do they plan to accomplish this? Yes, obviously, they have the capability to do the ultimate "man in the middle" attack, but I have rather a huge problem with them analyzing my traffic and modifying it enough to intelligently inject malicious scripts into pages I view.

More to the point, ISPs keep announcing grand plans like this, but not mentioning how they plan to detect "pirates" or what appeals process they plan to put in place. And yes, I know we'll all joke and say "none, of course", but realistically, you don't just lose all your rights as a result of engaging in minor civil offenses against a third party. Hell, even serial killers still get their day in court.

I'd like to know how they are going to go about detecting such, without incurring complaints that they aren't outright blocking such. If it is just 'you're using bittorrent' then they are also blocking lots of legitimate bittorrents (including a major MMO). If it is just detecting connection to known pirate sites, why don't they just block them outright?

I'm guessing they'll make a whitelist of 'legal' trackers, or at least those large enough to be noticed by Verizon (like the MMO) and just assume all others are piracy. It'll mean blocking things like niche linux distributions and independent free media, but Verizon may well consider that an acceptable loss.

More to the point, ISPs keep announcing grand plans like this, but not mentioning how they plan to detect "pirates" or what appeals process they plan to put in place. And yes, I know we'll all joke and say "none, of course", but realistically, you don't just lose all your rights as a result of engaging in minor civil offenses against a third party. Hell, even serial killers still get their day in court.

Actually, they have announced how they plan on detecting pirates. They will rely on the rights holders to send them complaints, and there is a (probably useless) dispute process. While this is better than deep packet inspection, I see the problems as:

1. If you do get a warning letter, your only recourse is to give your ISP $30 to dispute it with no confidence that they'll actually do anything or care.2. Even if you give them money to dispute it, you can still be effectively disconnected (throttled into us

attorney: "the RIAA is threatening serious litigation if we dont crack down on piracy"exec: "ok, we've been there before. what do they want"attorney: "they want us to crack down"exec: "done. tell them we will warn pirates and throttle their internet connection:"engineer: "thats not really feasible or possible given our resources and the nature of the internet as a self healing..."exec: "its a completely feasible way to solve this problem, i have complete confidence in its ability."engineer: "how would you know??"exec: "because the problem is a lobbying group, not a pirate."engineer: "how do they verify it works?"exec: "tell them to test from their phone."

Computer/phone manufacturers installing piracy tracking chips on all computers? After all without a computer you can't pirate at all. What stop there, maybe have a Best Buy employee make you sign a No Piracy contract before you buy anything with storage that can connect to the internet?

The equivalent of train robberies, bank heists, Indian raids, and muggings in the mining towns on payday are a common occurrence in today's online environment.

You and I may not think copying electronic bits is a big deal, but many corporations are ruthless enough to pursue a dollar anywhere. Never underestimate greed. The larger the corporation, the further away from reality sit its leadership, the more ruthless the organization becomes.

How could corporate greed be the motivation here? Verizon does not stand to gain a single customer with this scheme, but they stand to lose potentially millions or at least hundreds of thousands of customers in locations with broadband competition. They will lose me the second they try to pull this bullshit with me. I would imagine that their local competitors with similar pricing and connections speeds are going to be very happy if Verizon actually goes ahead with this insanity.

So how will they determine what's piracy and what's legit?Heavy bandwidth/bt users are pirates?Those who use thepiratebay are pirates?

The last few things I downloaded off TPB were legit promo albums given out by bands (one band: "Stockholm" is pretty good).The last few linux ISO's I downloaded, also bittorrent, as well as a few FOSS games.Wow and many games use BT for updates.So how would Verizon determine whether I'm a "dirty pirate" or just a guy who makes use of technology?

How could you tell? More seriously, Verizon is simply too cheap to upgrade its network to handle more traffic (Here's a hint, Verizon. It's called a "mesh network: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking [wikipedia.org]." Try asking an engineer instead of a marketing oaf or a bean counter.)

pirates do use "technologies such as bittorrent" to pirate. they also use usenet and usb sticks. the statement is not false.false would saying "all bittorrent users are pirates", "bitorrent has no legitimit use", etc.

this is a case of bias, but its your bias, not theirs. simply stating a thing in a simple way is not in and of itself bias.

Peh. No one knows how to write neutral articles anymore. If the BBC had an ounce of journalistic integrity, it would have used "various technologies including, x, x, x, but not solely limited to them."

Lol at you completely missed what I was aiming at, they are calling all people who break civil law by infringing upon copyright criminals by calling them thieves, that is where the bias is, this is certainly not the first time they've call copyright infringement 'stealing' and I doubt it will be the last.

A lot of people fail to realise that copyright is not a natural right - mankind got to where it is by copying - learning is a form of copying.

Or so I thought. In 2007 they sent me two DMCA notices and shut off my internet twice in one week. The second time they said "if it happens again, we will revoke your account." I said go for it. I can always get high speed internet from one of the other 4 providers available at my house. I kept downloading and never heard from them again.

To me, the lesson of the story is that the ISPs are willing to hassle their infringing customers to the point of making their service slightly inconvenient, but as soon as you threaten to take away their $40/month, they back down.

Netflix is Microsoft's pony. It only rides in Microsoft's fields. There's a huge segment of people that can't run it. It's also country specific.

What the heck are you talking about?? Netflix runs like crap on the 360...same with trying to watch almost any streaming video on the 360 whether it comes from Netflix or MS's servers. Maybe I have something configured wrong, but Netflix runs great on the WD Live+ or OS X. This is my experience. It also chaps my hide that I have to pay MS to use Netflix on my 360.

Insightful?! I'm a netflix subscriber since they were sending out DVD disks in bubblewrap padded envelopes. And yet I'm still reaching for pirate bay about as often as I use netflix. And I'll be doing it until there is a service that lets me download or stream absolutely *any* movies, shows, etc. the *second* they air anywhere in the world. Hell, I'm even willing to pay $300 per month for the privilege, not $7. And yet the entertainment industry continues to keep its head up its arse...

In order to better serve you with high speed internet we have instituted a fee for VPN access. This fee is to partly defray costs associated with internet piracy, the primary use of VPN service, and the overhead from allowing VPN connections, which as we all know are bandwidth intensive.

In other words people are just going to embed BitTorrent traffic within https packets.Use port 443 with https headers and just change the payload. They can do deep packet inspection all they want but they can't go into the encrypted payload.

Sure they will. They'll just make a whitelist of 'good' trackers, like the WoW updater. If you're doing BT but not communicating with one of the good trackers, they they assume you're a dirty pirate. The only legal users to be hurt will be people like linux downloaders and people getting CC-licensed films... and those people aren't a huge part of the market, so may safely be ignored.

as someone who runs deep packet inspection on a few networks I can tell you a) it is pretty easy to tell what shouldn't be passed through and b) a little sand in the underwear bites - Throwing in some junk data in the right ratio can wreak havoc on an ssl encapsulated torrent connection. Send all you want over ssl but it will be throttled and so much garbage by the end you won't want to waste your time after a few days.
I can also tell you it is pretty easy to block this even without deep packet inspection. Hint: dns tends to be required to get your torrent information in the first place, and it is pretty easy to send you a response from my dns server that looks like a response from your manually configured dns server. You won't know the difference and will just assume thepiratebay is down.

A lot of presumption there, anon, got any proof about the first part? I'm guessing on the 2nd part, but if they are interfering with legal traffic in an illegal manner no TOS Or any shit like that can prevent them from being sued over it.

Do you want the product? If yes, then it's not a waste. If no, then downloading it for free is pointless because you don't care about it.

Alternately - have you considered the idea of showing some moral fibre and either buying something if you want it, or doing without if you don't want it and/or disagree with the principles behind the business practices?

I really struggle with this idea of entitlement that says just because you want something you can take it. Just because you can do something doesn't mean yo

What you seem to be advocating is not simply paying MegaCorporation for something you know that you like or think you will like, but always paying for something regardless of how much you may or may not think you will like it. Like it is a moral issue. But it isn't a moral issue. By downloading some bits I am hurting no one. There is no victim. By downloading and sharing a particular pattern of bits I am exercising a basic human freedom in the digital age. It's a sort of freedom of movement really. My right

Except that they are pretty much a monopoly in their markets. If you are lucky, you have competing service through your cable company, which is probably already capped and for many will be Time Warner.

Mhm, and the rest of the ISPs are made of rainbows and sunshine. I like the https solution, I wonder what the pitfalls are besides lower performance, but bittorent started back when AOL was still around w dial up and hasn't changed a whole lot since. But there's a part b to this and that's they ask why is this computer connected to 500 others in seemingly unrelated circumstances, etc... Oh well, I've always been a proponent of get it away from the mainstream and back to the nerds and let it slip back unde

ISP's aren't considered common carriers as I recall. They do have some protections but it isn't the same as common carrier protections and as one would easily conclude they don't have the same obligations either. I could be wrong though, as I'm running on foggy barely awake memory here.

No, it damn well isn't elegant. The fact that you think so simply means that you haven't a bloody clue what you're talking about.

Those URLs of "known piracy sites" are the same URLs of sites that host significant amounts of perfectly legal content.

There are two scenarios that Verizon can follow:
- Invade everyone's privacy and inspect everything being downloaded, or
- Assume everyone who downloads more than a "certain amount" is "a pirate -- even when they aren't.

Whichever scenario Verizon chooses, it will be very wrong.

No, not "elegant" at all. Really, really bad. You really haven't a clue what you are talking about.

"I only punched you in the face! It's not like I murdered you or anything!"

But yeah, I don't see how punishing random people is an elegant solution. Anti-piracy schemes like this typically end up hurting not only the 'pirates' but also the people who don't infringe upon copyright.

And watch TOR grind to a halt under the load. TOR wasn't made to handle something like that. There are precious few exit nodes, as only those either very stupid or very dedicated to free speech are going to run them and risk being mistakenly accused of trafficking in child porn or hacking into the network of someone with serious money. An onslaught of torrenters would bring TOR to it's knees.

It's pretty clear you're violating the contract you signed if you are, indeed, pirating stuff. Hence, no reason for them to refund anything.

You're thinking of throttling people for using the advertised speed 'too much' when that 'too much' isn't defined and means you can only use the advertised speed for about 3.4 minutes before you get throttled. THAT is a contractual violation by THEM. Pirating is a contractual violation by YOU.

It's convenient that the artists whose works you are pirating can't demand a refund from you, isn't it.

That might make sense if the artists actually gave him anything. Most likely, someone else allowed him to copy the data, and he didn't receive any money or anything else from the artists. What would they want him to refund... a copy of their own works?

Actually he can. All he has to to is ask. I will refund every penny that he gave me. In fact, I would be perfectly willing to do even more and pay him the same thing he gets for a royalty on his work: probably no more than a nickel per unit. Or were you really referring to the actual owner of the IP, nearly always a gigantic mega-corporation?

Does he know you've taken his works without paying? If he doesn't, that's pretty unfair of you, isn't it.

I will refund every penny that he gave me

Can you stop being so petty? Maybe then we can have an actual discussion about the issue at hand.

...gigantic mega-corporation

So because a company takes on risk (nearly all albums lose money for the record company. Yes, really. No, not under some kind of tricky accounting. They generally really do lose actual real money), puts in all of the marketing, puts in all of the distribution,

Does he know you've taken his works without paying? If he doesn't, that's pretty unfair of you, isn't it.

They aren't his works anymore. He sold the rights to them to GiantEvilCorporation_00368. Once he's done that it really isn't any of his business anymore. I wouldn't think he would be in any position to complain.

So because a company takes on risk (nearly all albums lose money for the record company. Yes, really. No, not under some kind of tricky accounting. They generally really do lose actual real money), puts in all of the marketing, puts in all of the distribution, puts in all of the supply chain, you think you have a right to screw them because they have a lot more money than you approve of?

I'm not screwing them. I'm just not paying them. And, yes, I do think I have that right. I was born with certain inalienable natural rights as a human being. Rights not granted by any government. One of those rights or freedoms is to copy a bunch of bits. Whatever the benefits of GiantRecordCompany b

Apparently, judging from the article downloading is illegal. Only pirates do that.To see something like this go unchallenged in a Slashdot summary sickens me, but, well we all know what's really going on.

Comcast may have more of a vested interest in stopping piracy as they are also a media owner (owning NBC) and the production companies that produce many of their channel lineups for things like Syfi... among others.

But on the flip side -- given the quality of programming on their properties -- maybe they don't need to worry so much about piracy...*cough*..;-)